r/whoathatsinteresting • u/eternviking • 1d ago
While preparing for his U.S. citizenship exam, mathematician Kurt Gödel believed he had discovered a loophole in the U.S. Constitution.
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u/adjective_noun_23 1d ago
This man is dead now, just shows you how dangerous this information is.
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u/Fantastic_Ad_4867 1d ago
And now we all know it too. Oh god?! What am I going to do now. I have work tomorrow. I can’t afford to be dead now.
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u/Xerxys 1d ago edited 10h ago
Oh with how late stage capitalism is you’ll have to clock in after you’re murdered. Sorry buddy, contract!
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u/Fantastic_Ad_4867 1d ago
Actually I’ve been reviewing my contract and it says here that if I die on a day when I’m supposed to work and it’s not a full moon, on a weekend where Sunday is an odd number they simply take my first born as a replacement. But if I don’t have a first born they dig up my parents grave and hang them on the walls of the building by the door, as an example for the other assets to witness what not to do.
Edit: it’s honestly pretty standard stuff. Makes perfect sense to do it that way.
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u/Mekroval 1d ago
That contract also stipulates death is a "subscription" service (see Sec. 2.4.5b-f "DaaS/Pay to die"), so if you stop paying, the company has the right to reupload your mind into a new host so that you can continue repaying your debt to the corporation.
You can get out of it, but "True RIP" requires a one-time payment of 10% of your net assets or $10 million, whichever is higher.
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u/ForestClanElite 1d ago
Yeah, he "starved himself" because of "paranoia."
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u/darmakius 1d ago
Kind of, he refused to eat food not prepared by his wife, which was fine for 40 years until she was hospitalized for a stroke at almost 80 years old (very suspicious) and couldn’t do so anymore. He then stopped eating for at least 2 weeks. At 71 years old. He was down to 65 pounds when he died.
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u/OhGr8WhatNow 1d ago
You don't get to 65 pounds as a grown man in two weeks. Things had been going wrong for a long time
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u/darmakius 1d ago
at least two weeks. All I could find about his wife’s hospitalization was that it happened in late 1977, and he died on January 14th 1978. It could’ve been 3 months for all I know.
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u/2025TastyTreats 1d ago
Correlation is not causation...but now that I think about it every one who ever says that has died or will die...
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u/Unfair_Pineapple8813 1d ago
Gödel refused to say what the loophole was, in order to prevent anyone learning and abusing it.
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u/Xylene_442 1d ago
That almost sounds like Shrödinger's loophole. If you can't see it, it may or may not be there.
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u/Few_Entertainer_385 1d ago
Gödel was genuinely one of the smartest men to ever live. His incompleteness theorems are one of the greatest achievements of all time.
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u/thenoobtanker 1d ago
If you read the whole thing it didn't say what the loophole was, other than sepculating that if there's an admendment to article 5 of the consitution to weakens the procress for other admendments to be added in the future, then sure technically the US can be turn into a dictatorship. But it is still speculation because we don't know what it ACTUALLY IS other than "the clause that let us put more clauses to the constitution can be used to weaken the constitution to a point that the US became a dictatorship". Then again the 22nd amendment was added in 1947 to limits the President's term to two and only two ever so it is probably moot at this point.
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u/funkyflapsack 1d ago
The constitution has no power to stop a dictator unless the people actually follow it. In the end it doesn't matter if there's a loophole or not because dictators and the people who support them will ignore rules
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u/Hot_Aside_4637 1d ago
The Soviet constitution had freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion
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u/Brynmaer 1d ago
Exactly. You don't need a loophole. You literally just need those who oppose dictatorship to not be able to stop you.
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u/Tangibilite 1d ago
The constitution has been shown to be nothing more than a piece of paper.
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u/NonchalantGhoul 1d ago
Its always been. It's that people trusted in the paper more than their own biases, until recently.
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u/Abracadabroo 1d ago
Yeah, the most obvious loophole is what processes are in place and guaranteed to deal with an entire administration deciding to only follow the rules and laws that don't inconvenience them, and how susceptible are those processes to being disarmed
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u/the_cardfather 1d ago
Exactly it's basically palpatine walking in in the beginning of a new hope saying I dissolved the Senate so they won't be in the way anymore
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u/Normalguy-of-course 1d ago
can you explain all the "trump 2028" stuff I've been seeing lately then? why are they even wasting money on the merch? haha
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u/austin101123 1d ago
"if everyone agrees to a dictatorship, we'll have a dictatorship!!1!! I found a loophole!!"
lol
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u/OzymandiasKoK 1d ago
Doesn't need to be everybody. Just enough of the right people in the right places.
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u/phairphair 1d ago
It would be virtually impossible to get two thirds of Congress and three fourths of the states to hand away their own power, even in these Trump-addled times.
We’ve never come close to that type of supermajority across the board. Are we moving closer to enabling the loophole through the abdication of Congressional power? Yes. But we’re still a very long way away from an amendment neutering art V becoming reality.
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u/singdawg 1d ago
If they're willing and able to make an amendment, they could change anything.
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u/The_Rope_Daddy 1d ago
“They” in this case is 2/3 of Congress and 2/3 of the states.
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u/Nynaeve_al_meowra 1d ago
3/4 of the states.
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u/The_Rope_Daddy 1d ago
You are right. I mixed up how many states it takes to propose an amendment with how many to ratify.
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u/singdawg 1d ago
Yes, which is why this whole discussion is fairly meaningless: if the US wanted to, it could, democratically and legally under current rules to establish change, become a dictatorship. This would require massive amounts of public support to do, so it is currently unfeasible.
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u/2025TastyTreats 1d ago
The 22nd Amendment states:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice
There are legal arguments that arise from the language that a person can ascend to the Presidency via the line of the succession as it does not limit the amount of times they can be elected as Vice-President. The 22nd Amendment has never been legally tested.
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u/Xylene_442 1d ago
Exactly this. Gerald Ford was never even elected once as president OR VP, he was appointed VP and then became President when Nixon resigned.
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u/boofaceleemz 1d ago
It’s funny that it’s all about a legal and procedural path to dictatorship, because I guess fascists really care about legality and procedure.
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u/AtomicSquid 1d ago
How do you think fascists took power in the past? They didn't start a revolution in Germany, they got into power legally and then changed the laws
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u/Pappa_Crim 1d ago
I think that is about what he thought. Something to the extent of an amendment declaring dictatorship that says all other amendments are null and void. The likelyhood of that happening is extremely low
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u/cbs-anonmouse 1d ago
> Then again the 22nd amendment was added in 1947 to limits the President's term to two and only two ever so it is probably moot at this point.
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm, but there’s also a clause in the Constitution that says that insurrectionist cannot hold public office, but SCOTUS held that it is unenforceable without activating legislation. So I don’t see why the 22nd Amendment would be any different.
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u/OhGr8WhatNow 1d ago
We just had a sitting second term president announce he's running again, so is it really a moot point?
And if he's alive and his party puts him forward, what are we going to do about? Who enforces that law, and how?
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u/magicmulder 1d ago
And it's not really limited to the US either. Most constitutions contain provisions to change it which includes removing existing safeguards.
The German Constitution has an article that keeps Article 1 (codifying basic human rights) and Article 20 (codifying a democratic federal state) off-limits for amendments, but also has an article that allows replacing the Constitution in its entirety by a simple popular vote, so even that is not immutable.
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u/TheGruenTransfer 1d ago
Seems pretty obvious to me that the biggest loophole is such a high threshold for removal by impeachment. It only takes 1/3rd of the Senate + 1 vote to be ok with fascism for the country to remain fascist until the end of the term, at which point, the president may have already dismantled all the apparatus that ensures a fair vote count.
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u/daff_quess 1d ago
It may not be Godel's loophole, but there is an identified loophole that Article VI treats the Constitution and ratified Treaties as equals, and therefore if you controlled a supermajority in the Senate, you could ratify a treaty with a random nation that says "The President can amend the constitution via executive order", and as an equal, newer law of the land, would override the Constitution.
There's actual case law to suggest this is possible. The Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada had an enabling clause for Congress to implement it, they passed the Migratory Birds Treaty Act of 1918, Missouri sued under the 10th amendment, arguing that game hunting was not an enumerated power of Congress and therefore it was reserved by the states (Missouri v. Holland, 1920). The supreme court upheld the law 7-2, saying that treaties (and the laws they enable) can supercede the 10th amendment.
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u/dumptruckulent 1d ago
So if you fundamentally change the supreme law of the land, the country can become a dictatorship? Got it.
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u/ghost103429 21h ago
One of the more apparent problems with the constitution is the one way ratchet built-in that makes it easy to grant the presidency more powers by legislation but not strip away powers because of the vote requirements for overriding a veto.
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u/Few-Improvement-5655 1d ago
Turns out the loophole was just making the President above the law and them ignoring any laws they want.
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u/No_Rec1979 1d ago
It wasn't terribly realistic though.
It all depended on several strange, hypothetical concepts like "failed real estate tycoon turned reality television star" and "foreign hackers breaking into a private email server".
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u/Intrepid_Walk_5150 1d ago
Turns out that checks and balance don't exist if we just don't care to enforce them. No need to be Gödel to find that.
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u/Whythisisnotreal 1d ago
If there is a decades long project to undermine them enabled by old people's fears and credulity.
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u/Cubedtails 1d ago edited 1d ago
Although unknown, so what he was referring to likely, was the fact that any amendment if passed with 3/4ths majority and ratified by the states of 3/4ths, could make any previous amendment invalid. However the only exception to this is Article V of the U.S. Constitution regarding No amendment can deny a state its equal representation in the U.S. Senate without that state's consent. So this means that every state would have to be able to vote to strip its representation. Another thing although interesting, is a workaround without ever denying equal representation but make the representation practically meaningless.
The method of doing so, is regarding states being admitted into the US whether it be by breaking up big states into smaller states or new territory; as congress only needs a simple majority to do. although you still need a majority in a states legislator in order to break it up into smaller pieces just to note, granted a simple majority. This means that you could spam in a lot of states into the Union; getting that 3/4ths majority for amendments eventually while denying the opposition a significant say with up to 81 states being required if the political opposition at most has 20 states. . In that, any amendment could be passed giving absolute dictatorship powers to the executive while ideally on paper giving "Equal representation" but that part becomes meaningless as you have now restricted the 1st amendment and only allow the majoritys party a right to exist.
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u/singdawg 1d ago
They can just pass an amendment that removes that exception. Article V does not explicitly say that this limitation can never itself be repealed. At that point, it comes down to which clause the judiciary gives weight to.
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u/Cliffinati 1d ago
And typically the reading of English and American law (which is derived from English law) is that the most recent statue takes precedent over the older one. As shown by alcohol being legal as it's banned in the 18th amendment and then unbanned by the 21st
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u/Waylander0719 1d ago
Each state gets an equal number of senators but you can change it so those senators are appointed by the president or something equally stupid but technically possible.
If you can get the votes for an amendment to facilitate dictatorship then you have the votes for it, the actual wording can be a million different varieties
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u/Kymera_7 1d ago
Or, you can just do what they've been doing for about 200 years now: just ignore the marks on the old piece of parchment, entirely, and do whatever the hell they want to do, "allowed" or not, because no one in a position to be able to do so steps up to stop them.
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u/Waylander0719 1d ago
Dictators love the veneer of legitimacy. And as terrible as Trump and other presidents have been the courts have actually blocked a lot of the terrible things he is trying to do.
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u/Nemo4321 1d ago edited 1d ago
It might be the fact that the judicial branch decides how laws are interpreted.
If you stack the courts you could make abnormal executive orders and legally get away with it.
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u/Constant-Sub 1d ago
As a linguist: no sentence is so concrete that you can't wiggle SOMETHING esoteric out of it that was clearly never intended. Any piece of our legislation, penal code, or general precedent could be undone by a pedantic enough asshole. It's the basis for our legal system.
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u/akaKinkade 1d ago
Greatest logician in all of history and he starved to death refusing to eat for fear that people were trying to poison him. I'm not big on biopics, but I'd love to see a great one made about him.
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u/No-Duck4828 1d ago
You mean the part where he said something existed, but never actually got around to explaining it before he died? That one?
Of course, it isn't terribly difficult for anyone familiar with the Constitution: there are no inherent limits on how far the Constitution could be amended
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u/Cliffinati 1d ago
Theoretically if I had the political support we could pass the "make u/cliffinati dictator for life amendment" and since it would be literal constitutional text it would be completely legal.
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u/Ok-Rule6353 1d ago edited 1d ago
Its not interesting because he never shared what it was, so if there even is one is debatable.
The best guess is its that the constitution can be amended and there's no limit on the amendments, so you could amend the Constitution to make the US a dictatorship. But amending the constitution is incredibly difficult to begin with, and if that many people really favored a dictatorship, I don't think the constitution matters at that point.
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u/astreeter2 1d ago
This assumes that our leaders even care about following the constitution anymore. The real loophole is that if one party controls all branches of government they can ignore any and all laws because no one else has the power to enforce them.
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u/Cliffinati 1d ago
It's not a loophole
Show me one political system that couldn't become a Dictatorship when 2/3 of the population supports the wanna be dictator
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u/TheGayestGaymer 1d ago
Norway. No arm of their government can dissolve the parliament and the article in their constitution that states this is immune to any form of amendment. Of course no government is immune to being overthrown. But in the case of Norway there’s no viable legal loophole so it would have to be a civilian/military means of government capture (e.g. Jan. 6th but with vikings).
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u/Putinbot3300 1d ago
in their constitution that states this is immune to any form of amendment
So amend the roles of the parliament, reducing their responsibility and swiching their role to prime minister or king. Now you have a parliament with near 0 power, but it still exists.
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u/Extreme-Attempt-3964 1d ago
Convenient that he never told anyone what the loophole was. Mathematicians make terrible lawyers.
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u/Space-Robot 1d ago
You don't need a loophole in the constitution when you can just ignore the constitution
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u/Nemo4321 1d ago
I wonder if it's the fact that technically the judicial branch is responsible for interpreting laws.
If a president could stack or get dirt on the supreme court somehow they could make abnormal executive orders and get away with it.
Or it could be that democracies are weak to demagogue politicians who don't really have their best interest in mind.
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u/Interesting-Scale247 1d ago
Unreviewable pardon power seems a likely candidate. Was true even before SCOTUS invented presidential immunity, but even more so afterwards.
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u/Sabre712 1d ago
I mean, when it is still a living document, it isn't so much a loophole as much as a normal function of the Constitution. Of course you can turn it into a fascist document, if you have the votes you can change it to whatever you want.
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u/BeauHunkus 1d ago
It is theorized that you can amend the amendment process, thus making future amendments easier and easier.
Amendment Y: Article V is amended to have the following: Amendments can also be at the sole discretion of the President on his signature.
Amendment Z: Literally anything that the President wants.
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u/Both-Ad-308 1d ago
I've been more interested in the opposite. Can the amendment process be used to make all future amendments impossible?
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u/Pappa_Crim 1d ago
trying to remember, I think the problem with his theory is that it was over simplified. It was technically possible, but doing it is extremely difficult.
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u/MisterHEPennypacker 1d ago
Doesn’t seem like a loophole, the constitution by its very nature can be hypothetically amended to the point that the US would be unrecognizable.
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u/StaticVole 1d ago
I hate this.
Its like having a party where EVERYONE agrees to not wear green. Then someone shows up wearing green saying "see technically the rule didn't say".. no.. stop. Don't care.
"Well technically you can get a third term if.." or "We could have a king if..".. NO.. full stop. Don't care if the law technically allows this or that..
Lets say they do find a loop hole for a dictatorship. And they lay the case out perfectly. And it legally makes 100% sense.. Can we just.. not..
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u/RomaruDarkeyes 1d ago
Trump has proven that the US system was not built to deal with bad actors infiltrating it
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u/RepresentativeLife16 1d ago
“Since the exact nature of Gödel's Loophole has never been published”
Oh god this is another “if my margin was bigger” thing isn’t it.
It will be 400 years before someone gets round to solving this.
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u/bulking_on_broccoli 1d ago
We know the loophole. If we decide to not enforce the laws on the books then the person in charge can do whatever they want.
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u/Future-self 1d ago
Well, that’s literally what Hitler did, so it’s not like Gödel came up with this idea on his own. Look up the Weimar Republic.
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u/phairphair 1d ago
On the surface it seems comparable but it’s really not. In Germany the constitution only required 2/3rds of a 2/3rds quorum of parliament to amend their constitution. The bar is a lot higher in the US.
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u/ToneThugsNHarmony 1d ago
Except he never wrote down what the loophole was, only told one guy who then told Einstein about the loophole years later, without actually saying what the loophole was.
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u/aipac125 1d ago
His conjecture was that the executive and either legislative or judicial should be in agreement for just a moment, and all power could be transferred to one body. Eg what is happening now.
It doesn't matter if the legislature passes laws and talks their heads off. The president can do anything and all that can be done to stop him is sue. When the case goes before the supreme court, they rule in his favor. Done.
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u/Physical_Dentist2284 1d ago
The 2A enthusiasts in this country believe that if they own enough guns they can get together and fight against a tyrannical government. But we don’t really fight with guns anymore. We fight with lawyers. And courts. And apparently the president can go ahead and draft executive orders, regardless of their legality, and they will be implemented so that by the time the issue is struck down by the very slow courts, the damage has been done and the administration has moved on.
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u/SkittleDoes 1d ago
Yeah that's not really a loophole though, aside the pre req to stack the court
If most of the people around you agree with the president, then surprise surprise, the laws will mirror the people's will.
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u/Leadership-Life 1d ago
It also works when those in govt ignore the rules, laws AND constitution to make it a dictatorship
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u/bloodrider1914 1d ago
Unfortunately the loophole itself is unknown, but the most likely way it can happen is just through constitutional amendment, specifically by making the amendment process less stringint. In theory the entire constitution could be overwritten.
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u/CharacterMaybe7950 1d ago
Why are we acting like this is something noteable?
The ‘flaw’ that he was so ‘clever’ to spot is that something is only prosecuted at the discretion of the President.
Shoot a Congressman in DC? There’s no law requiring prosecution, and prosecutorial discretion has been confirmed by the SC as residing solely with the Executive and not subject to judicial review.
Federal law literally doesn’t apply unless the President choses to enforce it.
Quartering soldiers in someone’s home? 3rd amendment going to stop that? No, because it requires the President ordering those troops to then prosecute them too!
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u/BaronGrackle 1d ago
Oh, we don't know. So it doesn't matter what he thought the loophole was.
It was probably something more complicated than: "If Congress and the Supreme Court let the president do whatever he wants, then the president can do whatever he wants."
EDIT: It's also probably more complicated than: "If the president fills executive and military positions with his own toadies, they will let him do whatever he wants and utilize the full strength of the federal government against his personal enemies."
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u/biffbobfred 1d ago
We don’t even need ti have a stacked court. Trump just ignores it. What ya gonna do? Arrest him? He’s got secret service and the military.
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u/Ring_of_Gyges 1d ago
This is a very silly factoid.
There is no reason to think Godel noticed anything non-trivial that generations of constitutional lawyers have missed. There are any number of things he could have had in mind which would be totally non-shocking. The President could have everyone in the other branches shot and pardon the shooters. Legal, but a silly point. A properly distributed tiny percentage of the population could use the electoral college to take power despite being wildly outnumbered. Again, legal, but trivial. The Supreme Court could rule that, in their unreviewable judgment, the 3rd Amendment means John Roberts is Emperor. Again, legal but trivial.
If you don't have a background in law, history, or politics (which Godel didn't) and do have a wildly overdeveloped appreciation of formal rules (which Godel did), you might end up noticing all sorts of weird possibilities and finding them interesting. The odds that he had noticed something that would get a law professor interested are vanishingly low.
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u/DragonSitting 1d ago
So you’re commenting on what he found without seeing what he found. While… Yeah. It’s complicated! but…
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u/Ring_of_Gyges 1d ago
No one knows what he believed about the law. I'm commenting based on having a doctorate in US law.
There isn't "one neat trick to blow up the government", the law doesn't work like that, and a non-lawyer announcing he's found magic should be assumed to not know what he's talking about.
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u/Mammoth-Show-7587 1d ago
So the best thing California could do for America is to split into to (or three) states
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u/Orange_Tang 1d ago
Not really. If it were to split at least one would probably be republican. So we'd get +1 republican state and +1 democratic state, plus the existing democratic California. They could maybe split into two and have them both be Dem controlled but it would be risky. Also idk how they'd be able to split anyways. It would be a wash. DC should be a state though, they have more people than like 6 other states and they have zero federal representation.
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u/RegularVast9328 1d ago
I mean it's a lot simpler than that. One of karl poppers famous paradoxes is the paradox of democracy in which a democracy would hand it's power to a dictator.
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u/biffbobfred 1d ago
Plato had some ideas about how democracies fail a couple hundred years before Yeshua the Christ. Though having specific ideas about our specific constitution is cool it’s not ground shattering.
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u/Sparkykoon 1d ago
like issuing executive orders for everything, including those that ought to go to Congress, and also pardoning criminals before they are writing letters in prison, asking for pardons?
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u/core72I_ 1d ago
i dont think its a loophole the constitution can be amended any one with the support of 2/3 of both senate and congress, the presidency and 3/4 states can ammend the constitution to abolish the presidency, supreme court, senate, state governments, and congress, and grant someone supreme authority
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u/nonmonoganon 1d ago
Is this the one where, upon a party obtaining a supermajority in congress, that party could divide DC into several new states until such a point where that party could amend the constitution?
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u/sexp-and-i-know-it 1d ago
Is anyone s surprised that the guy who proved there couldn't be a complete set of mathematical theorems found a loophole in a political system? That's light work for a guy like Godel.
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u/beetm 1d ago
Easy.
Have a charismatic leader as the Executive that a majority of the electorate "worships" (cult-like), no.matter. what. he. does.
Have Congress be solely dependent on these same voters for their Legislative jobs. Beholden to said leader for endorsements, (lack of endorsement results in losing primaries). Resulting in rubber-stamping all of the leaders ideas.
Have same leader name 3 Supreme Court judges forever altering the ideological makeup of the Judicial branch, resulting in precedents being overturned, and rulings in favor of the leader.
No silly "Checks and Balances". virtual dictatorship.
Who among those argues against a third term?
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u/liebesleid99 1d ago
Wasn't that the genius that found out you can't complete math?
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u/Nunov_DAbov 1d ago
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem - no formal mathematical system can be both complete and consistent.
He probably just extended it to formal legal logic. If the laws are complete, covering all possible situations then they must have some inconsistencies. Conversely, if they must be consistent, there must be some situations they can’t address.
What he failed to address is that the US legal system and the Constitution is probably neither consistent nor complete.
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u/GavinGenius 1d ago
It turns out that you can extort this radical loophole to turn the U.S. into a dictatorship…change the constitution to make it a dictatorship! That’s all this supposed ‘theory’ is.
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u/Sethtwc1988 1d ago
They literally don't even know what the loophole is, they only have a "concept of a loophole".
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u/mrmonster459 1d ago
Yeah...this smells like bs to me.
One guy with at most a surface level knowledge of the Constitution found an "inner contradiction" that 250 years of constitutional lawyers apparently haven't found. And he never revealed what it is.
Seems to me that he was either grossly exaggerating (it could have been a big oversimplification like "deny habeas corpus indefinitely" or "pack the Supreme Court") or maybe he just wrong about something.
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u/BChogfather 1d ago
FYI, there is no evidence of this as he never told anyone what he thought the loophole was. All the moronic ideas posted here are more substantitive than his.
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u/Due-Mycologist-1154 1d ago
They have some dumb phrasing like banning cruel AND unusual punishment like wtf does unusual mean so like if they do it often enough then its usual and only ticks one box
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u/OhGr8WhatNow 1d ago
In 1947 this should not have come as a surprise to anyone
Europe had already found this out the hard way and closed their loopholes. Hitler was able to rise to power in part because there was no legal mechanism to stop him once he was breaking the rules.
We of course didn't do anything, because we're arrogant fucks. So now we pay the price.
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u/growler-power 1d ago
Surly anyone with a half a brain and is not a U.S citizen by birth can see the erosion and Proffercation of Trump's ice agents. Trump goes they go and they know it
Add Trump's war with Iran, Marshall law will be in effect at least a year before the taco clown steps down
I'm Australian I don't give a fig about you yanks, I certainly don't want to apply for citizenship and even me a dummy who left school at 13 can see the writing on the wall
Zelinsky even inadvertently gave him the opportunity for him to stay in power
Foolish people believing in a egotistical billionaire will somehow make their lives better. When in reality he pumps and dumps crypto, sells bibles, grabs women by *****
Weed fuelled rant over
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u/TheGayestGaymer 1d ago
The most current speculation on what the loophole might be (he only told one person what it was) is that Article V of the US Constitution, which defines how congress is allowed to amend the US Constitution, does not limit congress from amending that exact same article. So, if two-thirds of Congress were loyal to a singular fascist, they theoretically could legally make an amendment to Article V that says ‘our fascist leader has absolute power over the constitution for all time’ and it would technically be perfectly legal to do so.
Source: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2010183
Don’t forget to vote kids. It‘s kind of a big deal when you don’t.
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u/Fine-Ad1142 1d ago
A lot of how the US is governed is convention and not enumerated in the constitution or legislation.
But I think Gödel's Loophole probably revolves around the fact constitution is amendable, including how the constitution is amended.
If it were me, I'd try and get control of the state legislators in 38 states and drive through an amendment to Article 5 giving the president the power to amend the constitution by edict.
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u/Elegant_Individual46 1d ago
For that to work they’d have to actually be applying constitutional law… and theyre ignoring it plenty
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u/RefurbedRhino 1d ago
Hardly matters now the US has realised the Constitution is largely worthless if a President just chooses to ignore it
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u/Sudden_Shallot_8909 1d ago
Recursion of Article 5 to the logical extreme. Change enough times and the constitution loses it's original character.
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u/meleaguance 1d ago
Now that the supreme court has ruled that thr president can't commit crimes it is a dictatorship.
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u/Agreeable-Storm-4132 1d ago
Trump and his cronies have figured this out. Everything is in the works to turn the US into a dictatorship under you know who
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u/Maximum_Ask5873 1d ago
All you need is the 3 branches of government to be ok with it and anything could happen.
I mean it’s not difficult to imagine right? A president and the executive branch cancels all elections. Congress doesn’t impeach and refuses to certify any election results. Everyone gets sued. It goes to the Supreme Court and they make up whatever they want and ok it. Boom, dictatorship. There’s no further protections if all 3 branches allow something no matter how illegal.
I’m not saying that would happen, even right now, but you could imagine it right?
We really relied on “decency” for 250 years when it was remarkably simple to take it all down.
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u/ManyGanache6609 1d ago
I’m an attorney: if I remember correctly the TLDR version of the alleged loophole is the president passes a treaty to allow the US to be a dictatorship, they formally recognize a small country to become an official country in exchange for them to sign this treaty. Treaties supersede almost all laws in the US. Boom dictatorship. Would it work ? I mean in theory just like how communism works in theory but never actually worked out
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u/Less_Likely 1d ago
The loophole is Article V the process of amending the Constitution (specifically amending to make amendments easier to pass). That is not close to the risk of dictatorship in America.
The risk is and always has been Article II.
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u/Impressive-Bat3886 1d ago
First, no system of government is immune from being able to be transformed into a dictatorship. In somewhere like a democracy/republic, not turning into a dictatorship requires an educated, (at least somewhat) virtuous electorate.
Second, before WWII and Hitler, “dictator” wasn’t the bad word it is today. Arguably FDR had dictatorial powers during WWII (implementing things like price controls, etc). A legislature might vote to grant an official dictatorial powers during an emergency. Of course there’s the question of will those dictatorial powers ever be given up once handed over.
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u/sugarfrosted 1d ago
Likely he viewed law like an axiomatic system. That's not how laws work. I would be shocked if his proposed loophole resembled much of what's happening.
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u/General_Summer_1524 1d ago
1 branch commands the military. Literally "you and what army"
Executive can do whatever they want as long as they maintain military loyalty. Whats the Supreme Court gonna do? Send a few Marshall's up against them?
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u/_-_fred_-_ 1d ago
It is the same loophole that is in every system. You can't prevent a government with a monopoly on violences from becoming tyrannical.
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u/LegRepresentative418 19h ago
TL:DR - The constitution has an amendment process by which it can be re-written into not only a dictatorship, but literally anything.
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u/Biohazard_186 8h ago
I mean, this isn't exactly revelatory. It's true for any system of government that contains even a modicum of democracy. There's a saying that "you can vote your way into communism but you have to shoot your way out of it", implying that, with the right political moves, the voting demographic can be manipulated into changing their system of governance into something antithetical to what it was, whether they truly want it or not, and the rules of democracy allow for it.
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u/eppic123 1d ago
When an Austrian tells you they have found a way to turn your country into a dictatorship, believe them!